"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Tying One On

David Meadows at Rogueclassicism makes an interesting and plausible suggestion about the Greek vase painting I displayed a few days ago. He thinks that the girl isn't comforting a boy who's vomiting, but is instead helping him tie a ribbon around his head. The more I look at the painting, the more I think David is correct.

On headbands or garlands worn at ancient drinking parties, see especially book 15 of Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae and book 21 of Pliny's Natural History. Athenaeus 15.674 (tr. C.D. Yonge) writes:

But Aristotle, in the second book of his treatise on Love Affairs, and Ariston the Peripatetic, who was a native of Ceos, in the second book of his Amatory Resemblances, say that "The ancients, on account of the headaches which were produced by their wine-drinking, adopted the practice of wearing garlands made of anything which came to hand, as the binding of the head tight appeared to be of service to them. But men in later times added also some ornaments to their temples, which had a kind of reference to their employment of drinking, and so they invented garlands in the present fashion. But it is more reasonable to suppose that it was because the head is the seat of all sensation that men wore crowns upon it, than that they did so because it was desirable to have their temples shaded and bound as a remedy against the headaches produced by wine."

Athenaeus goes on at great length about various materials used to make garlands, such as osier or myrtle.

The most famous ancient poem about a garland is probably Horace, Ode 1.38: